After a couple of (unrelated) recent events, I remembered that some/most people use some desktop “word processor” for writing and maintaining documentation. After years of working with Wikis for virtually all documentation, I have to say that I don’t understand why people still use those dinosaurs. Using a word processor for documentation feels so nineties.

When working in technical teams, I think the advantages of the Wikis are amazing:

You know you’re always reading/modifying the latest version. Uploading to a central server or a shared folder, although theoretically possible (and I’m sure some people do), I don’t think it works as well.

You can link all content to any other content (and if you keep all your documentation in the same Wiki, you can link to other project documentation or general company/team guidelines or conventions, for example).

You can keep bits of documentation that don’t fit in a standalone “document”, like collections of small tips, lists of things to take into account when you do this or that, checklists, configuration/code snippets and examples, journals, etc. And of course link all that to any other part of the documentation, as stated above.

You think “globally”, in terms of the content, not in terms of “documents” that are (usually artificially) independent from each other. Also, it’s mentally cheaper to browse through wiki pages than it is to browse word processor documents, so the documentation is more visible and more used.

You focus on content, not on formatting or the way things are presented. It’s also easier to keep the same consistent look and feel for all your documentation, if you wanted to change it.

As you don’t have “documents”, just “documentation”, people feel free to edit and update it whenever is necessary, instead of feeling the need to ask the “author” of each document.

You don’t need any special program that might not be available in all platforms, or at least not interpret the document in exactly the same way. It’s also easier to access it from other computers.

Documents don’t get lost or become obsolete because of the format.

You usually get revision control for free (revision control that makes it trivial to see the whole change history for the documentation, review which exact changes some person has made in a given moment, etc). And if you’re using a Wiki that doesn’t support version control, you should use a different Wiki ;-)

Of course, I’m not saying Wikis are the perfect solution, let alone independently of the team, company, project and context you’re using them in, but I think in general they are quite superior as technical documentation repository for a software development team.